Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!unido!fbihh!weigele
From: weigele@fbihh.UUCP (Martin Weigele)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: What actually is AI?
Message-ID: <450@fbihh.UUCP>
Date: 6 Sep 90 09:04:29 GMT
References: <90241.112651F0O@psuvm.psu.edu> <90243.142616F0O@psuvm.psu.edu> <6560@uklirb.informatik.uni-kl.de>
Organization: University of Hamburg, FB Informatik, W-Germany
Lines: 39

powers@uklirb.informatik.uni-kl.de (David Powers AG Siekmann) writes:

>F0O@psuvm.psu.edu writes:


>>     In following the threads of my original posting, it seems that there
>>is not one definition of what AI is.  However, what my original question
>>was is, what is it that makes one program an AI one, and another one non-AI?

I hardly read this group, but the name on our news reader (David Siekmann)
made me curious... Helas, it turned out to be David Powers AG Siekmann!
(AG here is German for "work group").

But more serious: I think that "AI" originated from the ambitious claim of
being able to have computers accomplish "intelligent" tasks of human beings.
Nowadays, many AI researchers have become more modest (not all of them, of
course). They would keep the name to stand for the tradition of certain
"philosophies" underlying the work, such as (e.g. LISP) programming
methodologies, and often a bias on "interpretative approaches" when
representing knowledge rather then coding it in some more classical
programming language and compile it. In a sense, Tim is right: A commercial
banking application that models the bank's need on a computer, possibly
even programmed in Cobol, could be considered a "knowledge based
system" if we argue that the knowledge is contained in the Cobol code.

After having worked in both AI and more classical computer/computing
science environments, it is my impression that AI people often miss
a lot by a certain ideological barrier that makes them not look into
classical fields of computing, such as software engineering (This 
barrier works both ways!). It is true, often very similar things are
done under a different label. This is very striking when you notice
how little communication there is between e.g. mathematical software
engineering approaches and similar approaches from the AI tradition
(it's "logical point of view branch"!).

But maybe, after all, this is just a big game called sales rather
then science, in order to obtain funding... [but don't tell 'em].

Martin.